Abstract

God grants nobility only to the «well disposed soul», states Dante in Le dolci rime d’amor. But the terms «disposed» and «prepared» recur throughout the whole Book iv of the Convivio. That is because, the principle of the necessary disposition of matter to the reception of form and the complementary idea of the greater or lesser adequacy of this disposition, are valid, for Dante as for many of his contemporaries, far beyond the sphere of biology and pertain to physics in general and, further up, to first philosophy. The article aims to reconstruct the constellation within which this doctrine originated. For this purpose, it goes back to Aristotle’s reflection on dunamis, to the notion of epitedeiotes, first developed by Alexander of Aphrodisias and then reworked by the Neoplatonic tradition, and, finally, to the Avicennian idea of «appropriate disposition» (isti‘dād ẖāṣṣ).